The Myth of ‘European Values’
Editor’s Note: As much of Europe battles a rising tide of populist and nationalist sentiment, the murder of the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia offers a lesson into the future of “European values.” This adapted excerpt of The Fabulists: The World’s New Rulers, Their Myths and the Struggle Against Them, published in Britain by Oneworld Publications, looks back at her killing.
The commuters poured up from their morning ferries and buses into the old heart of Valletta, shirtsleeves and summer dresses still the order of the day in the southern European autumn sun. Most streamed downtown past the Auberge de Castille, an imposing baroque building that now serves as the prime minister’s office in the Maltese capital. It used to be the lodgings of the Knights of Saint John, who centuries ago made the city their stronghold and fed a sense of historically layered mysteries that lingers in the Mediterranean island-state today.
I took a taxi and headed north, along quiet roads where prickly pear cactuses tumbled over crumbling, dry stone walls. We passed the ancient hilltop settlement of Mdina, the old capital known as the “silent city” because cars are all but forbidden within its fortified walls, where few people now live. Founded by the Phoenicians more than two and a half millennia ago, it had been under Roman, Arab, French, and British occupation. Like the climate and the Maltese language, Mdina was a reminder of how the European Union’s smallest state is a cultural entrepôt that lies at a
